Twitter Opens Up Its Mobile Ad Network, Introduces Video

Twitter is making its mobile ad network available to a wider group of marketers and introducing new ad formats including video, the company said Thursday.

The social network last year began letting a select group of clients buy ad campaigns that would run on its own service and across third-party apps in its MoPub mobile advertising exchange. Now, the company says it's allowing all advertisers with dedicated account managers at Twitter to extend their campaigns outside of the social network if they wish. It's also renaming the product the "Twitter Audience Platform."

"We're taking promoted tweets, promoted videos and our mobile app promotion products into the world outside of Twitter," explained Adam Bain, Twitter's head of revenue and partnerships. "It's one click to take a Twitter campaign and scale it across all our partners."

Twitter

According to Twitter, the platform will reach a total of 700 million monthly users -- around 300 million on Twitter and about 400 million across partner apps. The company will use information it has about its users to target ads across partner apps where possible, but will also use its information to build "lookalike" audiences to help show marketers' ads to the right types of users.

Social networking and online ad giant Facebook made a similar mobile ad product widely available to marketers in 2014, which it calls Facebook Audience Network. Last week, Facebook said it would introduce auto-play video ads to the network because the format performed so well on its own service.

Twitter introduced auto-play video ads to its own service earlier this year, which it said are performing well. It hopes to see similar results with video across its ad network.

"On our owned and operated property, video is our fastest-growing format. There's a lot of demand for it, so we're making sure we can extend that," said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter's senior director of revenue products.

Twitter is making efforts to broaden and improve its ad offerings, and its changes appear to be having an effect. In July the company said second-quarter revenue rose 61% to $502.4 million compared with $312.2 million a year earlier.

Over time, Mr. Ranadive said Twitter plans to let advertisers pay for more objectives beyond video views, tweet engagements, and app installs and re-engagements. It also plans to further develop its formats and targeting and tracking capabilities, he said.